Fifty lessons from the Treaty of Versailles, 100 years after the 'war to end all wars' failed to end all wars

Left to right: British Prime Minister Lloyd George, Italian Council President Vittorio Orlando, French council President Georges Clemenceau and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson attending the opening day of the Conference for Peace in Paris on Jan. 19, 1919. AFP/Getty Images

From Europe through Africa, the Middle East and Asia, the world learned many hard lessons from the Treaty of Versailles

The Treaty of Peace Between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany was the most important of the many treaties that brought the First World War to a close a century ago. It was signed at the palace of Versailles, King Louis XIV’s lavish palace outside Paris, in the summer of 1919, several months after Germany agreed to an armistice and surrendered.

The peace negotiation was not only an opportunity to punish the aggressor Germany and repay the countries, especially France, that had been so thoroughly devastated by the fighting. It was also a chance to reorder the political world, to lay foundations for permanent peace, to allow new nations to be born out of dead empires, like the Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian, and to reshape the colonial influence of empires that survived, like the French, British, and Russian.

In some of this, the Treaty of Versailles succeeded, if only briefly, until everything was undone by another global war waged by Germany 20 years later. But its failures have become legendary, and today the document signed in the Sun King’s Hall of Mirrors is a lens through which historians view the grandest themes of the 20th century: the fall of empire, the rise of ethno-nationalism and the spread of revolutionary Communism.

In the introduction to Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan’s definitive account of the conference, Paris 1919, the late former U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke described what came out of Versailles as “flawed decisions with terrible consequences, many of which haunt us to this day.” He recalled, for example, overseeing peace negotiations in Dayton, Ohio, in 1995 over war in the former Yugoslavia — a conflict made seemingly inevitable, in hindsight, by the impossible agglomeration of diverse nations into one country, Yugoslavia, which was first formally recognized at Versailles.

From Europe through Africa, the Middle East and Asia, the world learned many hard lessons from the Treaty of Versailles. The National Post’s Joseph Brean describes 50 of them.

1. Germany was not permanently weakened. Other countries endured the fighting, but Germany remained a mostly undamaged economic powerhouse that could recover quickly.

2. It should be allowed recover, as the economist and conference delegate John Maynard Keynes argued, against those, such as the French, who were keener on being harshly punitive.

3. It was in the interest of other nations that Germany become a prosperous economy, not only so it could be a trading partner, but as insulation against a return to military aggression.

The cover of a publication of the Treaty of Versailles in English.Auckland War Memorial Museum

4. Reparations were not unduly severe in their effect on the German economy …

7. By the time Germany stopped paying reparations, after its economy collapsed and the Allied powers agreed to a suspension in the summer of 1932, Germany was well on the road to Nazi fascism. Adolf Hitler would be chancellor a few months later.

8. The Treaty of Versailles thus became a recurring and popular theme of Adolf Hitler’s propaganda, scorned as a “diktat” imposed by an “international clique.”

9. Not giving Germany a seat at the Paris negotiations, nor any real chance to participate in the process other than sign on threat of an immediate invasion and occupation, was a lingering source of resentment, seen by Germans as deliberate humiliation.

10. Self-determination for nations emerging from imperial control was a popular and attractive idea, championed by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson …

11. … but also dangerous. MacMillan has called the idea “controversial and opaque,” as it seemed to apply to a whole range of communities, large and small, geographically linked or divided.

12. Ethnic nationalism was a major threat to national self-determination. Nations were not cleanly divided in the way that empires were.

13. Creating unified nation states out of diverse populations with many minority groups was, in effect, creating “mini empires,” in MacMillan’s phrase, with all the challenges of full-size empires.

14. Yugoslavia, a nation for the southern Slavic people, became a tragic case study in this problem.

15. There are in fact several southern Slavic peoples.

16. There are the mostly Orthodox Serbs.

17. There are the mostly Catholic Croats.

18. There are the Slovenes, and also the Montenegrins, and others. Their common trait in 1919 was in seeming like they were each alone in the world, small players that would do well to band together.

19. The new country did well economically …

20. … but mainly as a result of increasing integration with a resurgent Germany …

21. … which eventually became a liability.

22. King Alexander I, who was installed atop this new kingdom, would soon sour on democracy and abolish partisan political parties in favour of dictatorship.

23. Dictatorship works well enough if you find the right sort of benevolent dictator, as Yugoslavia did after the Second World War in Marshal Tito.

24. Tito was able to hold together this awkward amalgam of people by suppressing its various ethnic nationalisms just enough to get along.

25. His death in 1980 set the stage for others, notably the late Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, to exploit these tensions, pit Yugoslavs against each other in bitter competition for power, and ultimately wage a series of wars that saw genocide return once again to Europe.

26. The original causes of the Wars in the Balkans of the 1990s can therefore be traced, indirectly, to Versailles.

27. Dissatisfaction with the terms of peace can lead to worse, even for the victors.

28. Italy’s prime minister in 1919, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, for example, failed to secure the land to the east of modern Italy that he demanded, which undermined his domestic political credibility. He ended up being forced out of office less than a week before the treaty was signed.

29. He would later express relief that he was not a signatory to such a failed document.

30. But his failure to win Italian dominion over Dalmatia sealed his own fate as a top politician …

31. … and was a key factor in the rise of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

32. Peace treaty negotiations are a grand place for revolutionaries and radicals to get together and compare notes.

33. Mark Bradley, a historian at the University of Chicago, has called Paris of 1919 a “university of revolution.”

34. One of those revolutionaries was a Vietnamese nationalist who would later be known as Ho Chi Minh.

35. Ho had been an itinerant cook on steamships, travelling the world, including Britain and America, where he made contact with leaders of other fledgling revolutionary movements.

36. Versailles was the once in a lifetime opportunity for Ho and other Vietnamese nationalists to press their case with the men who were negotiating the future of French Indochina.

37. Wearing a rented tuxedo, Ho attempted to present American President Woodrow Wilson with a letter demanding eventual autonomy from France for the Vietnamese people.

38. He was ignored, and there is no evidence the letter was received.

39. It is dangerous to preach self-determination but ignore those seeking it.

40. Convinced the Western powers were hypocritical, Ho turned instead to Russia for patronage. Already a determined socialist, he became a formal Communist agent and recruiter in China.

41. After the Second World War, as France sought to re-establish control over Vietnam, Ho’s leadership was a key factor in Vietnam’s declaration of independence and the resulting military campaign.

42. As France became less able to control Vietnam, it leaned for help on the United States, which was keen to hold off the spread of Communism in Asia. Versailles, in this sense, set the stage for America’s disastrous war in Vietnam.

43. At Versailles, imperial powers looking to confirm their colonial ambitions were in no position to do so, but still they tried.

44. Britain had taken control of Palestine and Jordan. In Iraq, Britain supported the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire that made a hero of T.E. Lawrence. France had taken control of Syria and Lebanon. Neither had a clear plan for the Middle East, other than to share it.

45. It is perilous to impose a new political order on a country stitched together out of three distinct provinces with different strategic significance, as in Iraq’s formation out of regions around Basra, Mosul, and Baghdad.

46. A dangerous dynamic was set in play when the British writer and adventurer Gertrude Bell, as London’s “Oriental Secretary” in Baghdad, drafted the constitution of Iraq and installed a government under a puppet king. As it tried to impose control and extract taxes, the Iraqi government relied on its British-backed military power, even against its own people. As the monarchy collapsed, the army was unduly influential and feared. Eventually, it would fall under the control of the Arab nationalist Ba’ath Party, deeply hostile to the former colonial patrons. So it was only a matter of time before a murderous dictator like Saddam Hussein would be in power, as he was for a quarter century.

47. Despite the highly principled talk of self-determination, African nationalists were excluded from the negotiations, and the African colonial prizes of Germany — Togoland, Cameroon, East Africa, and South West Africa — were divided up with little or no consultation of those people.

48. France had been invaded by Germany twice in the previous 50 years, and was worried that Germany would soon be able to invade again.

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